By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Confusing and confused as it seems to me to be, Knox's whole discussion of the church's memory of Jesus (including such claims as that "the Church remembers both more and less than the Gospels contain" [50] and that "there has come down within the body of the Church -- in, around, and underneath the Gospel materials and reflected more directly in certain statements in the Epistles -- an authentic remembrance of Jesus" [53]) serves to make a valid and important point. In fact, one might say of it what he himself says of the efforts of others -- namely, that "a sound instinct has been at work among those who have insisted on the reality and importance of an extrascriptural source of knowledge of the Church's own intimate past" (53, n. 3).
Knox's discussion seems to me to be both confusing and confused, however, because, in making the distinction necessary to enforcing his essential point, he does not distinguish, as I do, clearly and sharply between the empirical-historical Jesus and the existential-historical Jesus, but rather distinguishes between what he usually speaks of a "the facts of Jesus' career," or "facts about him or his life," on the one hand, and "Jesus himself," or "the man himself," on the other (47, 50, 52). (He typically distinguishes, more generally, between "facts in the ordinary sense," or "factual data in the ordinary sense," and "the concrete quality, the felt meaning, of an event in the past" [42, 53, n. 3]. Or, again, he distinguishes, in the particular illustration of his father, between "the facts about him -- his appearance, his words, or his actions" and "his reality as a person" [38].) Of course, this distinction as such is not confused; and I could conceivably appropriate it to say what I am concerned to say in distinguishing between the empirical-historical and the existential-historical Jesus. But the confusion involved in Knox's use of it becomes apparent when he proceeds to identify "Jesus himself" with "the inner personal life of Jesus" (56), as distinct, say, from "the concrete quality, or the felt meaning of Jesus for our inner personal life." (The similarity between Knox's view and Herrmann's at this point is, to say the least, striking.)
Even so, Knox is moved by a "sound instinct" when he distinguishes, however confusingly and confusedly, between one kind of remembering and another and insists, in his own way, on "the reality and importance of an extrascriptural source of knowledge of the Church's own intimate past." Such an extrascriptural source is indeed real and important because Christian experience is not only distinguishable from scripture, but also prior to it – as well as, indeed, to the formally normative Christian witness of which the scriptural writings themselves are but formulations. And this experience is a historical more exactly, an existential-historical experience, which as such is an experience of the past and, as such, a matter of "memory," or "remembrance" – not, to be sure, of the "what" of that past, but of its "that," or, to use the slightly different terms that Bultmann also uses to express the same distinction, it is the memory of "what happened in the past, however it may have happened," as distinct from a memory of "how it happened." Moreover, the proper function of scripture, as well as of the formally normative Christian witness by which the scriptural writings themselves are to be normed, is to mediate Christian experience as just such an existential-historical experience of the Jesus of history.
On the other hand, the only way whereby the existential-historical experience, and thus the memory, of Jesus that is constitutive of the church can be mediated from one individual to another is through the first individual's witness to the second. Because this is so, it is hardly enough to say, as Knox does in speaking of what for him is formally normative Christian witness -- namely, the New Testament -- that it serves as "a check upon, as well as a resource for, the life of the Church (including its memory) in every age" (50). Formally normative Christian witness, whatever is rightly taken to be such, is not simply a check or a resource for the life of the church, but rather is the check (auctoritas normativa) and the resource (auctoritas causativa) therefor.
What is curious about Knox's confusion is that his discussion of the nature of historical events generally seems to be relatively free from it. Thus he can speak of "[t]he intimate and integral involvement within the very existence of an event of the meanings found in it by those among whom or to whom it occurs" (81). But, while, in his illustration of the death of a child in a family, he can say that an analyst would almost certainly cite "the character of the child as he was intimately known within the family circle" among "the reasons why this incident should have been for these persons just the event it was," the weight clearly seems to fall, not so much on the "character," or "inner life," of the child, as on the inner life of the family and its members for which the child's death has the meaning it has. This is, if anything, even more the case in his other illustration of his mother in his family. "[S]he is 'mother,'" he says, "only because we respond to her in a particular way and she to us. She has no reality as 'mother' prior to, or independent of, our reality as her 'sons' and 'daughters: My awareness of her as my 'mother' and my awareness of myself as her 'son' is really one awareness, and the fact of her being 'mother' and of my being 'son' is really one fact" (92).
Not surprisingly, therefore, Knox can say in yet another passage that "it would be more precisely accurate to say that its [sc. the Event's] importance lies in its having been seen than in its having been done, in something heard than in something said -- that is, if one has to say the one thing or the other" (21; cf. also 46, where, notwithstanding his insistence on saying both things, he glosses "the man Jesus" by speaking of "what he was heard to say and seen to do, what he was known to be, what was observed to happen to him" [italics added]).
25 January 199
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